A new week with WordPress! A new week filled with interesting and exciting news from the WordPress community around the world. As usual, we have searched high and low to compile a list of news in our weekly WordPress recap.

But first of all, I just want to point out it’s Friday! (If you for some strange or tedious reason forgotten it) You know what it means! An awesome weekend lies in front of us. Therefore I wish you an awesome Friday as the weekend kicks into full swing.

To All of You! Happy Friday!

One of the great news we looking forward to is the release of WordPress 4.8. Which will be the first major release in 2017 and the goal is to release 4.8 June 8. There are numerous exciting and interesting features coming in the next version. Some blogs have already written about what’s coming in WordPress 4.8 as you can see below in the list of articles.

Furthermore! Another remarkable discovery comes from the Wordfence. Pan Vagenas, one of the researchers from Wordfence took a closer look at abandoned WordPress plugins in the WordPress repository. Abandoned WordPress plugins refer to plugins that not been updated for several years. Which also allows for likely security risks.

For example, you can read that 3,990 plugins have not been updated since 2010 which is over 7 years ago. Wordfence also found WordPress plugins that appear to have vulnerabilities that haven’t been fixed. Some of them have thousands of active installs. Consequently – Time to check your plugins guys!

Let’s check out more of the WordPress news from our Weekly WordPress Recap this week, shall we?

WordPress News

WordPress 4.8 Release Targeted for June 8 – WordPress 4.8 kicked off in this week’s core developer meeting and the schedule for the upcoming release is now published. Beta 1 is scheduled for May 12 and the official release is targeted for June 8.

Image Courtesy – Wordfence

22 Abandoned WordPress Plugins with Vulnerabilities – As an interesting research project, Pan Vagenas, one of our researchers, took a closer look at abandoned WordPress plugins in the WP repository. His work is inspired by a recent post by Isabel Castillo where she lists the oldest abandoned WordPress plugins in the WordPress plugin repository.

Speed Up Your WordPress Development Using Code Generators – Wouldn’t it be great if you had fill-in-the-blanks style code snippets for all future WordPress theme development project at one place? All you have to enter the name of the theme you were working on. Set your preferred parameters, and be good to go.

Apache vs. Nginx: Pros & Cons for WordPress – Apache, and Nginx are very established projects, and they both have their own reasons for being so whilst achieving a similar identical goal of serving your WordPress site. However, when we look deeper in their designs. There is a major difference in how connections are handled by each server.

How to Sell Digital Downloads with WordPress Sites – There is a systemized technique that you need to follow and undergo in order to sell digital downloads with WordPress. Here is the complete procedure that you should implement on your WordPress site to facilitate digital downloads.

How to Prevent Hotlinking in WordPress (5 Easy Methods) – Nothing is worse than someone stealing your images or bandwidth. But this happens fairly regularly as everything is out in the open on the internet for people to easily link to. In this post, we explain what hotlinking is, why it is bad, and how you can prevent hotlinking on your WordPress website.

WpAlter Review – White Label the WordPress Dashboard – WpAlter aims to let you customize pretty much every aspect of the WordPress dashboard. You can either use this for your own site or, probably more likely, you can use WpAlter to customize the WordPress dashboard for your clients.

Episode #123 – Cory Miller from iThemes – Cory Miller started iThemes back in 2008 as a premium theme company for WordPress. Today he and his company is known for their Backup Buddy plugin and iThemes security.

WordPress Interviews

Interview: How to Teach Audio Skills with WordPress – Björgvin Benediktsson is a musician, audio engineer and writer based in the US. Besides his own audio projects, he helps other musicians create better music and promote themselves more effectively. How does he achieve this? WordPress!

Ending Notes

In conclusion. Happy Friday to all of you! Yet another inspiring week in the WordPress community. I hope you have a really good time reading our roundup. Let me know about all WordPress stuff you come across so we can add them to our next roundup. Remember to check your plugins guys! So your plugins not are any of the abandoned WordPress plugins in the WP repository.